Why Learn Python Programming?

Learning a programming language can open many doors and mastering it would mean you have a modern-day superpower! But when it comes to deciding which language to learn, you’ll inevitably hear a lot of reasons that are actually useless for a person who knows nothing about programming yet. For example, you would be told that some languages compile faster (whatever that means) or have static or dynamic typing (and it’s bad for some reason). If you go around the programming communities, you’d be surprised to see the heated debates about the languages and platforms with lots of cryptic arguments. Let’s try to have a look into the issue of choosing the first programming language to learn from the point of view of a complete beginner.

So, if you want to learn programming, you probably want to do that for some good reason: to create a cool game for yourself and your friends, to create an app to sell it for billions, or maybe to save the world. And Python is powerful enough to do all of those things. Of course computers aren’t smart enough to do all the work for you, but the Python tools are really versatile and can be applied in different projects.

You might be scared to start learning, but Python is great for beginners. It will not intimidate you with endless brackets, curly brackets and colons. It’s as simple as English. To prove this, let’s compare simple programs, written in popular programming languages. There’s a tradition among programmers, that the first program to write in a new language is a simple output of the words Hello world!

In Python the program would look as follows:

print ("Hello World!")

It’s simple, readable and understandable to anyone who knows some English. Yes, there are brackets and quotes but that’s something you’ll need to get used to if you want to become a programmer anyway.

There are other beginner-friendly languages. Ruby, for example, also limits the code to a single line, though the command itself is not so straightforward:

puts "Hello, world!"

JavaScript can create the same result in two ways:

console.log ('Hello, world!');
oralert ('Hello, world!');

none of which uses an immediately understandable command. And you’d need to distinguish a console and window output right from the first lesson.

If we look at the giants of a programming world, like Java, C and C++, we’ll see that to create the simplest of all programs, we’d need extra cryptic commands and lots of curly brackets. An interesting exercise would be to count how many words you actually understand in those programs, apart from the Hello world! phrase.

Java

C

C++

public class Main {

public static void main(String[] args) {

System.out.println("Hello, World!");

}

}

#include <stdio.h>

int main()

{
printf("Hello, world!\n");

}

#include <iostream>

int main()

{
std::cout << "Hello, world!";

}

So by simply comparing these introductory pieces of code, you should appreciate Python’s elegance. You are able to concentrate on the logic of the program instead of fighting with its syntax. Probably it’s one of the reasons why 80% of the top computer science departments in the world use Python in their introductory courses.

By all means the real programming is not about the shortest code or the most understandable commands, but they might be important factors to keep the motivation going for the first couple of lessons. And after you learn the first bits of magic, you’ll be hooked and inspired to study something more complicated.

Considering the range of possibilities - applying Python is breathtaking. It’s powerful on its own, enabling you to program desktop applications as well as web applications. The numerous libraries which extend the functionality of pure Python are created to solve various problems. For example, there are NumPy and SciPy libraries for scientific computing while PlotLib would enable you to create data visualizations. If you are interested in game development – there’s a Pygame library, and if you want to analyze human language and communication – you may use nltk or Natural Language Toolkit. Actually there are libraries for various areas of application: biology, astronomy, cryptography, multimedia, networking, web-processing and many others.

If that’s not convincing and has not sparked excitement and curiosity, you should know that many companies famously use Python in their productions. For example, Disney utilizes it in their creative processes and Mozilla releases tons of open source packages built in Python. It is employed for regular system programming, automation and testing, for building a startup, as well as gaming, Common Gateway Interface and web development. NASA, Dropbox and Youtube use Python, while Facebook, Instagram and Prezi rely on its Django framework to keep their server-side running.

So Python is a low floor, high ceiling and wide walls programming language, absolutely suitable for beginners while providing great tools for advanced programmers to scrape web pages, build games, solve math equations and plot the results and much more.

Python is a modern general-purpose programming language, equally popular among beginner programmers and professionals. Its’ clear and consistent syntax is a great way to start the exciting journey into computing. At the same time, it provides quite a comprehensive set of tools to enable development of sophisticated projects.

Python’s creator, Guido van Rossum, chose a short, unique and intiriguing name after the hilarious BBC classic comedy series from the 1970s.

Free Python IDLE environment is downloadable from the official website www.python.org. It provides a working area with a basic graphical user interface. An interactive interpreter enables writing and executing code line by line, which makes the programming process straightforward and easy to start.

This window is inviting to write your first line of Python code. And you already know what that line should be! So give it a try - you are on your way to becoming a Python Developer! The possibilities are endless!!